Here Together Are Our Hearts: The Love Songs of Sharon Van Etten

With her clarion voice and plainspoken desperation, Sharon Van Etten mainlines the grand mess of being alive directly into her music—mixing sorrow, empathy, and anxiety into an tingling emotional apex.

The population of Sky Rink—an indoor ice-skating venue overlooking the Hudson River and, just further west, the smudged shores of Hoboken—is comprised almost entirely of children under the age of 10, and yet the sound system is still blaring Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”. Sharon Van Etten and I have done a couple solid loops—nothing fancy, but still, some good, propulsive work—when something goes wrong. It’s hard for me to say what happens, exactly, but we end up in a wiggly little heap on the ice, our limbs entangled, our skates kicking high in the air. Van Etten is laughing pretty hard. She is sort of on top of me. A couple young men in hockey gear glide over to help us up, gently brushing the shaved ice from our shoulders. They are after answers regarding our predicament, but we have none. “Dude,” is all we can say to each other, and to them.

With her big, almond-shaped brown eyes and easy grin, Van Etten is a warm, snickering presence, and, capering around Manhattan with her on two brittle March days, I get the sense that she’s amenable to most things, as long as they are fun. We spend a lot of time looking at each other and saying “dude”—either because something funny has happened, or because we’ve suddenly caught ourselves being, as she puts it, “so emo.”

Van Etten has lived in New York City since 2005, but she’s never been ice skating here. In fact, she has not been ice skating since she was a little kid—she is the third of five, the middle child—in Nutley, New Jersey, when she fell through the ice and her father had to fish her out. During a pre-skate breakfast, I tell her a story about how, just a few days earlier, I unexpectedly passed out at a film screening in Kentucky, and she immediately promises to get us both fully outfitted in all sorts of protective gear: helmets, pads, what-have-you. The idea of us not skating does not occur to her, and I get the sense, then, that she believes deeply in redemption and perseverance: in just getting the fuck up.

Since she released her debut album, Because I Was in Love, in 2009, Van Etten has established herself as a vocalist capable of imbuing every note with an astonishing spectrum of feeling, of crafting melodies that feel nearly unprecedented. She has always been an unguarded performer, but her fourth album, Are We There, is a kind of emotional apex: There is a line, toward the end, about washing someone’s dishes before taking a shit in their bathroom. She says this is a joke that merely stayed in place—the product of a very late and giggly night in the studio with her band—but her willingness to allow it to become permanent is telling. Van Etten isn’t particularly interested in obscuring or mediating the grand mess of being alive. “I sing about my fear and love and what it brings,” she bellows on a new song called “I Know”.

Prior to the release of Because I Was in Love, Van Etten lived for a stint in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where she got into a relationship that warped, turned poisonous. She doesn't especially enjoy talking about that six-year stretch of time, but it’s clear that the implications of her life there—and the intensity of her disavowal of it—lingers. Her partner was derisive of her work, which she had to hide from him; she doesn’t say it, but I suspect, in a way that makes me queasy, it might’ve gotten darker than that.

“I literally had a bag of clothes and my guitar, and [a friend] drove me to the airport—she was one of two people that I told I was leaving, it was that intense,” she says. (“You chained me like a dog in our room,” she would later sing on “Love More”, a song from her second record, Epic). Van Etten was estranged from her family then, but she returned home on Thanksgiving Day, mended relationships, moved into her parents’ basement in Jersey, and found a job in a liquor store. She started writing and recording the songs that would become her debut. “I’m still a softie, but back then I was so defeated,” she says. “He told me I wasn’t good enough, and I really believed it.”

During a brief stopover in her West Village apartment, Van Etten shows me the photograph that’s slated to appear on the cover of her album. A print of it is balanced atop her dresser in a way that suggests it might also serve as a rune against certain indulgences—a reminder. She took the picture herself, from the passenger’s side seat of a speeding vehicle, and it features a woman—hair loose, sunglasses—sticking her neck out the window, wooshing past a stretch of farmland. Looking at it, you can imagine how good it must’ve felt, doing that: all that wind smacking your face, the sun on your ears, the push of the car as it tore toward the horizon. For a record that’s concerned with transitions—with trying to go easy into whatever’s next—it’s a telling shot.

“I had just moved back to New Jersey from Tennessee, and I was trying to get my life back in order," Van Etten explains. "I had a really good friend in Tennessee who I went to visit. We used to work together, and our ritual was to get Diet Cokes and a pack of cigarettes, and to blast music and sing at the top our lungs. We wouldn’t even talk, really—we’d just sing. That’s how we got our relief. We took turns screaming out the windows [of the car],” she says. At some point, Van Etten pointed her camera to the left and clicked.

“We both went home, and the rest of our lives changed forever after this moment,” the singer recalls. “She moved to Indiana and ended up having a baby—she has a family now—and I moved to New York and ended up doing this other thing. But this photo means a lot to me.”

Van Etten eventually found a community of supportive players in Brooklyn, including TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone, who urged her to find a place in the city, to make a real go of it as a songwriter and performer. “I was doing a solo set at the Bowery Ballroom when Sharon introduced herself to me,” Malone remembers. “She gave me a CD-R with a few songs on it. At that time, TV on the Radio had a lot of attention and lots of strangers were giving me music—more than I could possibly have kept up with—but she seemed like she was giving me a gift. I found her again after I listened and we talked about her music and her writing. She is a kind person and a great talent—her voice cuts through the wall I’m constantly trying to build around my heart.”

There were other encouragements along the way. In 2010, Van Etten found out the National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner had collaborated with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon on a high, spectral cover of “Love More”, and she reached out to compliment their version. (“I thought it was badass that they put it in the original key and Justin had the balls to try it,” she says.) It was a fated introduction: Aaron Dessner ended up producing her third album, Tramp, which was released by Jagjaguwar, Bon Iver’s label.

“It’s amazing to watch her in the studio, because she can sing three, four, or five-part harmonies with herself perfectly on the first try," Dessner says. "It’s like this harmonic sense is hardwired in her brain.” By early 2011, Van Etten was opening for the National on their European tour. “All of a sudden we were playing in venues that hold 15,000 people, when we’d previously been playing for rooms of a hundred, two hundred, maybe,” she says.

Van Etten is a transfixing performer—her body relaxes, her eyes go soft and unfocused, and her voice sounds conjured, as if it is coming from somewhere else—but she still occasionally suffers from the hubris of it all: standing on a stage, expecting people to listen, to be changed. “I overthink everything. I’m just like, 'Wait, why do they want to hear me?' I start doubting myself. Other times, I’ll just get so emotional during a song. Sometimes I’ll cry while I’m singing.” She pauses. “It’s so weird. I’m such a baby.”

That struggle—to balance the solipsism of confessional songwriting with a life that, like all lives, requires some degree of selflessness and sacrifice to grow—has been hard on her. She is working, now, to find some sort of balance. “The dilemma I have is that everything I do at work is all about me, and at what point is that selfish? I’m just talking and singing about myself, or I’m standing on a stage and hoping that everybody likes me. Obviously it’s also about the music and feeling and connecting; I know it’s deeper than that. But on a down day, I’m like, ‘I’m a really selfish person.’ Half of my anxiety is about whether people are going to like me,” she admits.

Of course, that’s all anyone ever really worries about; it’s the origin worry, the worry that drives us. But there are more practical concerns, too—all the challenges of a life lived to the spastic specifications of a tour itinerary. “I love traveling, I love meeting people, I love performing, but it’s hard to be gone, and to not have a real life, and to just get the emotional love that you need from the people you’re traveling with,” she says. “The last two years, I’ve been figuring out how to balance my work and my relationship.”

Specifically, she’s been laboring to develop a partnership with a boy she loves despite the extraordinary demands of her job. He has always been encouraging, and she’s grateful for that. Van Etten remembers noticing him at an early solo show at the now-shuttered Sin-é on the Lower East Side, where he worked for awhile: “I was fresh from Tennessee, whiskey-drunk, and being super aggro—I just wanted to get shit-faced and sing these love songs. There were maybe eight people there, just a bunch of dudes hanging out, and I was like, 'Fuck it, I’m kind of a tomboy, I can deal with this.' I remember being halfway through a song, looking up, and the bartender was the only one listening. He supported me from the very beginning.”

Now, their relationship is changing. “It’s so hard to maintain a life and do this kind of work. It’s a struggle, but I also wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have this catharsis all the time,” she sighs. “You tour for a year and a half, and it sucks for the person waiting at home, feeling like you're left behind. Looking back, that’s what a lot of the songs are about. We love each other so much. But to really nurture a relationship, you need to be present,” she says. “Maybe right now the best thing to do is for us to step away—like, ‘You do your thing, I’ll do mine, and maybe one day we’ll find each other again.’”

I tell Van Etten the only helpful thing I can think of—advice stolen from a letter John Steinbeck sent to his teenaged son Thom in 1958. Thom wrote to say that he was in love; Steinbeck wanted to offer him some solace, some consolation, some sense of peace in the midst of the total tumult love incites. “Don’t worry about losing,” he wrote. “If it is right, it happens—the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

"I’ll just get so emotional during a song. I’ll cry while I’m singing. It’s so weird. I’m such a baby.”

Eventually, Van Etten and I attempt to take our big ice-skating ideas to Central Park, but when we arrive, a bored-looking woman in a ticket booth tells us that the rink is about to close so the ice can be smoothed. We retreat to the lobby of the nearby Ritz-Carlton—there’s something marvelously indulgent, we agree, about lounging in a fancy hotel bar on a weekday afternoon—descend into overstuffed leather armchairs, and order Manhattans.

Are We There is an expansive, nearly theatrical record, and more rhythmically complicated than anything Van Etten has done before. “I started hearing bass lines and drum parts before I heard guitar,” she says. Dave Hartley of Philadelphia's the War on Drugs contributed bass to most of the album’s tracks. “She has a way of just being herself, of truly wearing her own skin,” he says of Van Etten's work. “On her first three records, you could tell that the songs wrote themselves—it was as though they were beautiful by-products born through her experiences, like steam escaping. On the new record, there seems to be more purpose.” Hartley’s bandmate, Adam Granduciel, felt similarly: “Being in the studio with her, I witnessed a songwriter more interested in quickly capturing those fleeting moments of inspiration than anything else,” he says.

Are We There is also, as far as I can tell, about being unafraid in love—about seeing love as a kind of high-stakes trust-fall, and screaming at the other person to just fucking fall already; then, the concomitant feeling, the fear of falling, the way it paralyzes you. While there are bigger songs, “Tarifa”, a quiet, slow-to-unfold ballad named after a town on the southern coast of Spain, feels like the album’s emotional center.

“Tell me when / Tell me when is this over? / Chewed you out/ Chew me out when I’m stupid,” she sings over a muted swell of Hammond organ and bass clarinet. It is both euphoric and deeply, devastatingly sad, and it mimics the highs and lows of any love: When it is good, it is so good, but when it is over, it is everything. “Don’t fail me now,” Van Etten begs during one of the song’s final peaks, and her voice is nearly incredulous—it’s the way we sound (disbelieving, angry) when something we thought was true begins to falter.

“I’ve never seen him more happy or more at peace than when we were in Tarifa together,” Van Etten says of the song’s subject now. “We had this solar-powered house overlooking fucking Morocco, in the mountains. We could walk down this rocky coast. It was rugged and desolate and peaceful, and after everything we’d been through, it was exactly what we needed to reconnect. There was nothing else but us, and we were really happy.”

Photo by Dusdin Condren

For me, the love songs on Are We There periodically incite a kind of raw, unstoppable blubbering, a crying so outsize it becomes laughable, like when one of those ASPCA commercial flashes onscreen, unbidden, at three in the morning, when the bourbon has worn off and you are sort of crumpled there, hungry and too tired to sleep—it is a reminder that our hearts and bodies contain sorrows and empathies we didn’t even know we could access, or at least not so quickly.

“The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment,” David Foster Wallace once said, and Van Etten is both cognizant and protective of that divide; she works hard to keep her songs open enough that they can be applicable to lives other than her own, can become a balm for different kinds of pain. Still, when she drifts into her mid-upper register—it’s that little upward swoop, as if something precious has just gotten away from her, like a toddler losing his grip on a helium balloon—it becomes impossible to imagine anyone else performing these songs, or feeling them the way she feels them. Even when she’s singing somewhat vague lyrics, she has a habit of choking a line off in a deeply counter-intuitive, non-idiomatic way, of pausing mid-thought, of making us wait for the denouement, “And here we are apart, but here together are”—wait, wait, wait—“our hearts.” These lines are suffused with so much investment it’s hard to hear them as nonspecific.

Drinks in hand, we talk—abstractly, and then less abstractly—about the worst way to lose someone, about what it feels like to know that your love is not going to be enough, that time or circumstance is triumphing. (“I love you, but I’m lost,” is how she puts it on Are We There.) I tell her that I believe these are the most brutal kinds of endings. The ones where you think: I’ll come back from this, but maybe not entirely.

Eventually, we are both hunched over in our big stupid chairs, crying. Van Etten pulls some tissues out of her bag. We start laughing. Those are the poles: despair begets joy begets despair begets laughter. Want begets want begets more fucking want.

But still, Van Etten is hopeful. “I think everything makes you better as long as you don’t have any regrets. Find some love in whatever’s happened in your life and move forward,” she’ll shrug later on. “I’m overly optimistic sometimes. My favorite movie as a kid was Pollyanna. There’s no point [in negativity]. Yeah, I’m upset, but it’s love. Everything is love, right?”

Ultimately, Van Etten is writing about how to reconcile all the different things a person might require or want—and, moreover, about the struggle to determine what can be endured and what needs to be excised in service of the work, the spirit, the self. This is not simple math. The parts that feel good and the parts that feel bad aren’t always so easy for us to identify, let alone untangle. “You like it when I let you walk over me/ You tell me that you like it,” Van Etten sings in the chorus to “Your Love Is Killing Me”, until her voice gets subsumed by the clamor of her band, and it sounds, for a second, like she’s drowning.

It’s the part on the record that I end up playing over and over and over again, listening, through the thrum of organ, drums, guitar, for the moment where she reemerges.

Sometimes I hear it.

When we finally pull ourselves together and leave the Ritz-Carlton, a cold, vigorous rain is falling on New York City. Van Etten suggests we go play pinball, which seems like a particular kind of salve; it is a pastime that eludes tragedy. She knows a place on Third Avenue where you can pay by the hour. It turns out to be a bare-bones operation: there’s no beer, no snack bar, no air hockey, no noise beyond the sound of steel balls thwacking plastic.

We throw off our coats and hit the classics: Star Trek, Kiss, Metallica, The Addams Family. I become temporarily preoccupied by a game called Dr. Dude, wherein I ascend—and I am proud of this—to the level of “Major Dude” while Van Etten looks on, occasionally high-fiving me. When we finally gather our things to leave, one of the employees, an older man with a gentle face, stops us. “You guys play league?” he asks.

We are trying to figure out a reasonable place to eat dinner—she is due at the Bowery Ballroom in a few hours to see the War on Drugs and especially to watch her guitarist, Doug Keith, open with his own band—when we spot a storefront psychic and decide it would be real funny to go in on a half-deck Tarot reading. We press a plastic doorbell and huddle outside, pulling our knit hats low, shrinking from the rain.

“What do you think she’ll be wearing?” Van Etten asks, and I am halfway through describing an extravagant turban when a stout, dark-haired woman in a beige turtleneck appears in the window and unlocks the glass door. I stop talking immediately. Her bottom lip is bleeding. “Yes?” she says.

We mumble our request. She invites us in, opens a small gold box on her desk, and removes a stack of cards. When she sees me digging my audio recorder out of my coat pocket, she sneers and delivers a look of livid, lingering disbelief. “You can’t record this!”

I turn it off and hold my hands up, like a burglar nabbed mid-heist. Pressing a wadded-up tissue to her lip, she commands Van Etten to cut the cards, and what follows is surprisingly intense: an unflinching evocation of death, heartache, and lost equilibrium. There are direct echoes of conversations Van Etten and I just had—which are maybe the conversations everyone has, about where they’ve been and where they’re going and who they love and why—and periodically we look at each other, like, “dude.” The essence is that she wants Van Etten to be tougher, somehow. To believe more selfishly in the work she can do.

A few minutes later, after the psychic has been paid and we have pulled our coats back on, we re-emerge into the rain. It’s getting dark.

We are quiet for a minute. “How about a drink?” Van Etten asks, and we walk off.